Cornish saints and sinners

This old book has introduced me to some new Cornish legends. It's essentially a travelogue of 3 friends touring the county in the early twentieth century when there was already an awareness of an older world passing. The tone is archaically humorous and gets annoying after a while but I was surprised how much I learnt. And some of it is genuinely funny.

Like the legend of St Ia, who sailed across from Ireland on a cabbage leaf. King Tewdrig was fed up with so many saints entering Cornwall and putting a strain on the local economy. He passed a law that "foreigners without luggage, or visible means of subsistence are not allowed into the kingdom." St Ia pointed to the cabbage and claimed it was luggage and also a form of subsistence but King Tewdrig's customs officers pointed out it was pickled so a manufactured article. St Ia committed herself to the waves once more and was carried on to St Ives where she planted her cabbage leaf an grew a miraculous crop of pickled cabbages and wrote a history giving King Tewdrig a very bad name. Hence the legend. Possibly a metaphor for our own time in their sometime. When was the last time you saw pickled cabbage?

There are interviews with authentic Cornish characters that you don't get these days and lots of other legends that I'd never heard before, like Princess Olwen and the brambles, St Michael and the conger and how the chough got its red beak and legs.

And it raises some interesting ideas. Having investigated the folklore surrounding mining, farming and fishing, J Henry Harris says the china clay industry lacks any little people because it is too new. The first edition of this book was published in 1906. Some forty years later, airmen were convinced they had seen gremlins up to mischief on their aircraft.

So now I'm wondering if the Cornish china clay industry has some little people after all. Anyone out there seen one?